Day 4088 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

2 Timothy 1:7 ESV

What is fear?

Is it a feeling felt always in only fight or flight? Is it the fight found when finally face-to-face with the facts of our fragility and its tendency toward our failure? Is it the failure we find inside that flight spent trying often in vain to rise above the rain and pretend we know nothing of pain? Is it the frailty of feelings forced upon us from frightening things stood before us? Is it our faith finally figuring out that we’re all destined for a downfall or fallout without any say as far as when it comes or how it goes? Is it going wherever He came to ask we come without much in the way of courage to be found along the way, but a choice chosen anyway as we finally see we’ve no other choice should we wish to find a life?

Is it so wise as to seek for life when most around us are living as if they’re alive already?

Is it wisdom at all?

As far as I can figure our feeling of fear is a fragment found in our finding out that we’re far less powerful than our pride would otherwise go happily on pretending we were. It’s something of this soul stood realizing that not even the fullness of all we are or have to give is always able to give us the results for which we hope. For the truth is that in this life we all hope always for everything to go well, to feel good, to end right and that at the end of what’s preferably a short journey which starts the same.

Yes, we’re so mundane to be still of the brain that thinks still that we need life still, calm, quiet so that we can always have that luxury of gathering our thoughts alongside the time with which to comb through them removing from them those decidedly heavier, harder, more harrowing thus. For these are things unto which we feel unworthy and they then unworthy of us. Rather we seem still to believe that life should always unfold as we perceive, as we prefer, as we opine.

As if life needs our help figuring itself out.

Which it so obviously doesn’t because, well, life went on just fine without us long before He found reason for us to start our trial run through it. And, well, truth is that the world will remain whatever this is that this world’s become long after we’ve become cold and forgotten.

For that’s just how life works.

It goes on. It moves forward. It weathers the storms and fights the battles and asks that we all face them with fear in whatever manner or measure it may happen to be that we ourselves see as being the version we need. But that’s just it, there are varied versions of it. Fear isn’t just this emotion elated in scary movies or ghost stories told around a campfire surrounded by the odd silence of the dark. No. Rather fear is something which is almost an achievement in us as it seeks to inspire within us a willingness to face something uncertain with a certainty that it, whatever it is, deserves such respect.

For I believe that fear is nothing but respect.

Granted, it’s a respect shown in something other than the common awe we have for the allure we’ve witnessed within others that we’ve come to respect because of said presence and the awesome power, confidence, assurance that they seem to show. It’s a respect known not because of success or superiority necessarily but rather one in which those things are momentarily undone and we’re left holding what is the brutal honesty that, sadly, our lack of humility has thus left us lacking an ability to see or realize otherwise.

Indeed, fear is something measured in humility as it either humbles or humiliates.

And I think that’s why we’re all so afraid of fear. It’s because it’s often proven only humiliating. And that because, well, we’ve become a folk who often joke as if we’ve got life under control. That we can basically force things to always go our way. That our way is even still a thing!

A lie we’re afraid to find we’ve spent a life telling ourselves.

A truth found when faced with something far bigger than us that insists upon not our wants being won nor our will being done but rather the wants and will of another proving perfectly capable of superseding our own. And that effortlessly.

And indeed, it seems as though it’s the lack of effort needed to overrule our dreams, desires, disasters that designs inside this immense twist unto the plot of our story as has often been told only of pride and glory found inside how powerful it has us so usually convinced that we are.

Yes, fear helps us find just how powerful we aren’t.

And as those who seek to control everything so as to, again, ensure that everything goes always according to our plans and promotions as are always to be proven only in popularity and profit, finding ourselves faced with anything that we can’t control and thus can’t convince to go along with us toward our proving of the providence to prove victorious, it’s terrifying.

After all, what’s worse than the world maybe seeing that all this time we’ve been lying and that we don’t have it all together, that we don’t have it all figured out, that we’re not as big and bad and bold as we’ve always told everyone else we were?

What’s worse than those around us finding out that they don’t really know us as we shrink into a corner cowering in cowardice as we’re faced with a reality that’s stolen our confidence and replaced it with only weakness?

Yes, it’s weakness.

We think fear is weakness as it reveals in us our inabilities, our uncertainties, our misunderstandings as to the importance we have and the power we’ve not. It shows forth the reality of our reality and how it’s often nothing even close to what we’ve really wanted people to believe it was.

And that only because we seem to have somehow managed to always keep hold this idea that we’re here to please people and impress the same.

And now that’s not to say that we’ve not the responsibility to control ourselves in such a way that allows us to always present ourselves as those approved already and as thus those merely here discharging the duty to which they’ve been dually sworn. For indeed, such is our duty to undertake this fight daily to show ourselves to the world as those living such good lives here that we do stand out as those then unafraid to do so as if no judgement nor disappointment rendered of us by those around us means all that much to us.

It’s not that we’re supposed to just fly through life worried little at all as to the mark we make or the impact it has.

No, we are representatives of the very God of Heaven, missionaries, emissaries in what is an immense undertaking spent taking the Gospel with us everywhere we go as is told both in the words we say, why we say them, but so too in the actions we choose which so often say far more than our words ever could.

And, well, what then does it say should we enter every day, every conversation, every opportunity we’re given already afraid that it may not go our way?

What does it say that we are still afraid of things not going our way?

What does it say that we still seem to so assume we have a way by which or for which all things need to go?

Do we yet not know?

That this life is not our own? That nothing has ever promised to prove unto us this power we love to insist we have to embrace the good and avoid the bad? That we even perhaps need the bad, the hard, the heavy, the scary as they teach us things about ourselves that we just can’t find or figure out when the sun’s shining and we’re winning?

That we need to lose so that we’ve had at least some practice when it proves that this life is lost as it’s lived in only a place that so clearly already is as He’s promised it shall one day be?

And that forever.

Which, in all honesty, I think that’s arguably the most common fear felt amongst man. It’s that ringing of the coming end calling to tell us that we’ve still some stuff of us, in us that we need to sell while we can get something out of it that we can elsewise use for something perhaps a little more conducive to life.

Indeed, this is a truth I’ve been helped to find this past week, which has proven one both scary and yet too among the very best I’ve ever had the divine gift of getting to go through.

I sat upon my bedroom floor last Tuesday morn pressing through a workout that I oddly enough enjoyed again only to look beside at a wall covered in things that has so become my friend that I’d myself become afraid of losing them as I’d spent my life trying to find them and feeling this sense of success, accomplishment in having done just that.

Only problem’s that last weekend I was asked a question that somehow managed to bring me back to life in ways that I couldn’t have ever possibly imagined that I wasn’t as, well, I’d given up on it so long ago, out of fear mind you, that it was a side of life that I simply didn’t think about anymore.

Until I was tied tired to my bedroom floor absolutely floored by the realization that, no, life does not consist inside an abundance of possessions but that rather our so often becoming so possessed by our desire for possessions only tends to prevent us from living life.

All but instantly resolving my fear of failing to have everything I wanted to have as I finally realized that for years I’d fail to hold anything resembling a life at all.

And indeed, all of the sudden I’m not afraid of losing the stuff I have anymore because, well, I am afraid of missing out on more of the life I’ve not lived as I’ve lived hiding on a laptop trying to find one more thing to hang on my wall.

All of it bought because I was afraid of the thought of my failure to prove able to be anything other than I’d long since settled to stay.

For such is what we do when we’re afraid.

Fear freezes us in place and asks we don’t move an inch, don’t dare even flinch as the doing so shows a sign of life to that which exists around us which waits only to take it from us. Yes, fear tells us that there are things in this life that we just can’t risk as we’ve too much to lose, too much to live for, too much to look for in what’s become a life in which we measure our existence by the substance therein.

Always wanting more then proving a lack of the discipline designed inside the way this life is supposed to go.

For again, do we not yet know that it was God who designed this life and thus determined, defined how it’s to unfold?

And how it that?

Well, that part I think we do know. And that because, well, every life is known to hold hardship, difficulty, danger even. All of us have met with such monsters as uncertainty, misunderstanding, the very mundanity of morality and modesty seeking to quell our tendency toward partying so as to cover these hearts unraveling inside. Indeed, everyone here has felt fear, met failure, known their own frailty and probably then found out about their fragility too.

But do those things make us any less alive?

Have any of the times in life in which we’ve felt unable, unworthy, uncertain ever proven as fatal as our pride insisted they might? Has our fear of all things of which we’ve been afraid, questions we thus didn’t ask as we assumed already the answer wouldn’t be what we wanted to hear, chances we didn’t take for outcomes believed the same, opportunities we missed because we didn’t miss our chance to find an excuse to make it seem like it made sense to not try, did any of those prove truly the end of our life?

Honestly, some of them have.

And again, I say that looking back across what’s been one of the singularly strangest weeks I’ve lived in years.

Because I do hold now this fear that I feel in that I find that I have missed out on a life that I could have lived had I not lived this life I have the way I have. Not that it would have proven much different if any at all. But knowing the things that I’ve focused on, the faithfulness and fealty that I’ve given unto them, and the utter lack of life that so many have given me in return, yeah, I can’t help but believe that I have indeed missed some things.

Mostly because I was afraid to try for them.

Much like all those times that I was afraid to attempt a pushup because I knew I’d become so lazy that I’d too become too weak to do one. Or all those days I chose to eat like a slob and dress the same because I was afraid of trying to look good and feel better because I’d become convinced I didn’t deserve to. Or all the lies I’ve ever told myself about all the chances I refused myself to try something new, seek something better, get up off my recliner and get back into the fight that is this life that, if it’s not a fight nor filled with fright, honestly isn’t a life at all.

Why?

Because if we’re not moving, trying, failing, well then what are we?

For life was created to move, to try, to fail and fall down and become of the plausibly foolish audacity to get back up knowing odds are you’ll get punched in the face yet again. But the problem’s become that we’ve all become so adverse to such adversity that we turn from it immediately whenever we even think we see it coming. In fact, I’m pretty convinced that we go looking for it these days just so that we can convince ourselves that we do see it so that we can feel better justified, validated in our retiring yet again to our safe places and comfort zones.

How on earth did we allow ourselves to become a people of comfort zones and safe places?

We used to fight wars and tend farms and raise families and want then to prove of the ability, or at least the willingness to try, to protect them, provide for them, ensure for them their own opportunity to live this life the best they could.

So much for storming beaches and facing giants with just some rocks in our pocket.

No, we’ve rather devolved to exist now as a people with our hands in our pockets, our heads always hung low looking down at our phone, our clothes wrinkled and dirty, our minds and thoughts usually the same. We gave up almost everything because, well, everything here can be scary. Honestly, even going to the grocery store anymore brings with it the chance that it could turn into a quite harrowing adventure.

You been in traffic lately?

It’s every man for himself out there!

Which seems oddly enough just what we wanted and yet somehow everything we’re now afraid of.

Why?

Because we’re afraid of everything anymore!

Seriously, forget the butterflies bought in our trying to talk to the pretty girl at school. We don’t talk to anybody anymore as we’re pretty sure they’d not like or we’d not like them and, well, that has a tendency to maybe turn even violent now and then thanks to what this world’s become in which everyone’s always so stressed and on edge that we don’t seem to realize we plunged over it a ways back and now, potentially, have no way back.

Because again, any movement from whatever this is that we’ve become convinced is a life, it’s one taken risking the very death of everything we have, everything we are, everything we may still hope to be.

But friends, I just don’t see that we have any choice.

Because, well, staying put just isn’t one anymore. For there’s simply nothing about who we already are nor wherever this is that defines whatever it is that this world is now, there’s not a thing about any of if that’s worth missing out on the better that we and everything we see can still be.

It’s just that we’re afraid of everything because we feel like we have so much, are so much that we can’t then afford to risk anything.

But is it a better hope to not lose what we’ve got or to find out what all we haven’t had yet?

Don’t get me wrong, life is scary. And that’s because it’s filled with so much that’s uncertain, unruly, unfriendly, unfortunately. This chance is laden with choices in which there doesn’t seem a decent option, changes that often seem quite the same. It’s proven already precarious so many times, times in which we did fail or fall short or fall apart when faced with something so simple as a conversation we were willing to be afraid to have because we didn’t know what to say and assumed we knew what the other person might.

Is that any way to live this life?

To be always worried, always timid, always small?

Again, do we not yet know who we are?

Friends, we’re the blood-bought children of the very Creator of both earth and Heaven! Why then do still we walk about as if it’s all going to fall apart? And honestly, what would happen if it did? What would happen if we did lose everything? What would happen if she turned you down? What would happen if he did accept your offer to take it outside? What could happen if we tried? What might prove possible if we stopped proving capable of being so afraid all the time?

Because the simple fact is that fear, it’s not a bad thing.

Because the simple fact is that fear as we’ve come to know it isn’t a thing at all.

Rather this fear we all know so well, it’s just our laziness, our weakness, our willingness to concede and settle and lose out on the life we’re afraid to try for telling us that we’re better off staying put and avoiding the pain, the shame, the disappointment.

But are we really?

Take God for example as, well, there’s not really a better one. As we just discussed yesterday, His Word tells us that our fear of Him is the very beginning of wisdom itself. Should we then continue to discount wisdom, refuse understanding, mock knowledge and miss out growth in the hope held therein, should we miss out on knowing Him because we think we know what He will say, do whenever we try to?

Sure, our pasts have proven that we’re entirely worthy of what Christ endured on our behalf. Yeah, God should kill us on sight! Why? Because we’re the ones who caused His pain, His suffering, the shame He had to scorn because we ourselves had borne such lives of such sheer disappointment that His blood became the only ointment that could bring us the healing we need.

Should we refuse healing because we’re afraid to admit we need it?

My point is that fear is often nothing but some lie we tell ourselves trying to save ourselves from something hard that we’re not ready for, something scary we’re not looking for, something that’s possibly going to show us that we’re not so impressive as we’ve all but convinced ourselves we are.

But every time inside this life that we give way to being afraid, all we’re really saying is that we’re pretty sure the things we’d find should we endure it just aren’t worth it.

But how can we know that for sure?

Truth is we can’t know anything until we become courageous enough to try something. Thankfully the Spirit He gave us gives us that boldness to try, the power to try, the self-control that seeks to try it right and the love that’s able to make up for all the times that we’ll fall short.

So fall short. Fall apart if you have to.

Just do what He put you here to do as if you’re so unafraid to do it that you’re only afraid not to try.

After all, what’s the worst that could happen? That we could die?

Friends, we’re all going to anyway.

Guess then the only question now is will any of us dare to live before we do?

#LeaveNoSoulUntold